My reviews of games, movies, animes and other forms of entertainment!

Menu

Tales of Xillia is a Japanese RPG from Namco Bandai, and for those who not know, a series that started way back in the Super Famicon in Japan. While it doesn’t garner the same popularity as Final Fantasy its popularity grew a lot over the years not only in Japan but also in the West.

Story & Characters:

In this game of the series you have the option of playing as one of two protagonists, Jude, a young medical student or Milla Maxwell, the lord of spirits.

The story does start kind of slow and it can get a while before you get involved into it but once it does it has a way of grabbing you and not letting you go until the end. It can also get a little complicated at parts, especially when the characters start using terms from this created world and these words are so similar sometimes you can’t help but to feel confused. Nevertheless, the story while good is not something to be impressed but the characters are all very well done and likeable.

This for me was a particularly good point of this game. For reference, I played the last game in the series released for the Playstation 3, Tales of Graces, and in that game the characters were in my opinion so boring, bland and uninspired I could not for as much as I tried get attached to them.
In Tales of Xillia, you can rest assured because all of them, in each particular way good characters, even their voices seem to match each of them well. Continue reading →

Since Atelier Rorona for the Playstation 3 I can safely say I have became a fan of the Atelier series. Even though I have yet to play previous games I played and had a great time all the games that followed it, as it is here with Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk.

If you are familiar with these past atelier games this one follows the tradition and doesn’t have much significant changes but some subtle ones that may make you like it more or a little less.For those not familiar with this series I will give a brief explanation.

You play as a young alchemist, exploring the world, fighting monsters and gathering materials which later you can use to synthesize many items, be them weapons, armor, healing items and even more. While doing so you meet a lot of fun and lighthearted different characters, having a huge amount of events and conversations, some being quite funny and most of them enjoyable.

The story of the game, and these last games in the series don’t have that usual “let’s save the world” which is common in JRPGs, so in essence this is a a nice, slow paced game and I might add a relaxing one at that. I personally love that aspect of it as you’re not in a hurry you have your time to explore and go about what you want to do as you see fit, well kinda of. Continue reading →

Being a fan of previous MediaMolecule games Tearaway was sure to get my attention but I have to admit, with the little I had seen previously I was not convinced this would be something special like LittleBigPlanet. Well, thankfully I was wrong.

The first word I would use to describe this game is charming, more than platforming, more than adventure this game has charm written all over it.

This will be a short review, maybe not even a review as I am not going into much details, so forgive me if this feels like a small rant but given my disappointment with this game I’ll just try to right to the point. Continue reading →

I’m a big fan of Japanese RPGs and after playing Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360 and having a blast with it some years ago I was excited to play Tales of Graces f on the PS3 but how does it stands?

I will start by saying I’ve had mixed feelings about this game. Even thought Tales of Graces is an enhanced port of a Wii game and it would be unfair to expect it to at least have the same quality of graphics as Tales of Vesperia, there are some things that I think are not excusable but before going about the bad, let’s start with the good part because what is good in it, is actually really good. Continue reading →

So what kind of games are good for work, one might ask. When I thnik of it I am taking into account you’re not using the beefed up computer you might have at home but instead a PC with limited power, so games that are hardware intensive are left out of this list but I’ll probably have some exception as the laptop I have at work, while far from a good gaming machine, can run well some recent games like Fallout 3 (by recent I mean this gen).

Other things to take into account are how will you be able to play it, after all you are at work. I believe it for a game to be suitable for work it shoud match some criteria:

It can’t have long cutscenes, even though I like them a lot, since you are at work you never know when you are going to be needed. If anything, at least those cutscenes should be in the style of games that only the next line of dialogue advances as you press a button. At least if you have to do something out of the blue, at least the game is “paused” until you come back.

It can’t be action oriented: I love action games, especially technical ones such as Devil May Cry 3, Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, even though only one of those have a PC version, it would take too much of your attention and depending on the person could even have you screaming at the screen, not to mention the controls. Some games play perfectly fine on a controller just as a keyboard and mouse but not all of those, which leaves us to the next criteria.

Should be played well without a controller: Once I tried playing Rayman Origins at work. At first it seemed like a good idea, a platformer with an autosave feature each stage, infinite lives, which means you can turn it off at any time if needed but it had one single issue: controls. I found it really hard to play this game at its best using just a keyboard and unless you’re the boss I wouldn’t recommend pluging in your Xbox 360 controller, too much attention.